


Lit

by stormae



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Again, Alternate Universe - College/University, F/M, Fluff, Memes, Mild Language, Second-Hand Embarrassment, i hate it too im sorry guys, literally just fluff, sorry - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-22
Updated: 2017-04-22
Packaged: 2018-10-22 13:24:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10697904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stormae/pseuds/stormae
Summary: “What class is this?”His voice came out in a smooth, deep timbre that you’d had the pleasure of listening to once or twice when you’d had a tutorial with him, but for the most part he tended to keep to himself. “It’s lit.”





	Lit

The sun smacked aggressively on the tarmac as you dragged your feet, one after the other, each languid movement an effort in itself amidst the heavy summer heat.

The buildings that climbed upwards around you were modern and coated in reflective glass, throwing the rays of sunlight back towards their bearer in order to keep the people inside a little cooler in the warm weather. The campus of Seoul National University was colossal, requiring incredible forethought in order to get to lectures and tutorials on time, especially when your subjects so often spread themselves to the opposite ends of the campus.

You and your friends idled past the older, more European building that stood out in the centre of the campus, dwarfed in size and style by the modern buildings that surrounded it. It was cute, though. You appreciated the university’s effort to meld the different architectural styles, connecting innovation with tradition.

“You want to grab a sandwich or something before our next classes?” One of your friends addressed the small group of you. There was a mixture of listless sounds of agreement, all of you altering your course slightly to head in the direction of one of the cafes on campus. You were keen for something to placate your gurgling stomach.

Your hopes were knocked from your grasp, however, when one of your friends wrapped a hand around your arm.

“Y/N,” she said, amused concern on her face, “Aren’t you meant to be at a lecture now?”

Your heart stilled. “What?”

“You wouldn’t shut up yesterday about the economics lecture you have on today, because you were going to miss lunch.”

“Shit,” you wiggled out of her hold and yanked your planner from your backpack, eyes skimming the messy layout for the lecture theatre you needed, “shit, shit, shit.”

Your friends couldn’t help but chuckle as your face paled, realising the room in question was about as far away as it could possibly be. They were used to your disorganisation, used to having to remind you of your own schedule. You liked to think your status as a discombobulated chicken was endearing, but in reality your friends were just saintly enough to put up with your haphazard personality.

“I’ll see you guys later,” you muttered, not waiting for a reply as you began to run to the class you were five minutes away from missing. The lecturer hated latecomers, and if you missed the entire thing you were liable for a five percent non-attendance penalty. You couldn’t afford any more of those. Your grades were good, your organisational skills were not.

You took the steps into the building two at a time, leaping up them in the greatest athletic feat of your entire academic career, and bolted inside. The lectures started and finished every hour, on the hour, so you could tell you were late by the lack of people in the foyer space.

Another string of muted curses escaped through your lips as you tried to bolt as silently and inconspicuously as you could up the staircase and down the hall to the lecture theatre, finally arriving at the door in question a few terrifying minutes late. You hated this unit of your degree with a burning passion, mostly because the lecturer was the devil incarnate. You braced yourself for persecution and pushed open the unfortunately squeaky door, keeping your head low as you ducked into a seat in the back row. For a moment you couldn’t believe your luck when the lecturer didn’t call on you, but in another moment you realised something was amiss. The theatre was buzzing with quiet noise, the sounds of lots of individual conversations and fingers on keyboards and pages being turned in preparation for notes. No booming voice of your awful lecturer. No voice of any lecturer, at all. You couldn’t remember a time when he’d been late, forcing a defeated slump into your posture.

You lifted your head in a resigned motion, taking in the unfamiliar faces around you and the empty lectern down the front.

You were about to heave yourself from the seat and go off in search of your actual lecture theatre, when a small woman with tiny, rimless glasses wearing overwhelming clashes of patterned clothing tottered in, dropping a worn leather book bag at her feet and placing a laptop on the lectern.

She greeted the class, and your suspicions that this was not Economic Policy in Global Society were confirmed.

Panic began to filter into your chest, jostling with the resignation at your fate to receive another five percent penalty. It would be a miracle if you passed this semester. You couldn’t bring yourself to leave, by then. The class had commenced and you didn’t have the confidence nor the heart to stand up and leave, one of the rare bouts of your social anxiety rearing its ugly head and chaining you to the seat. Why were you plagued with the inability to get your life together? Why did you always get yourself into embarrassing situations? How did everybody else managed to stick to a schedule efficiently? What was their secret? Why were you excluded from their secret society of togetherness?

Your self-deprecating stream of consciousness was interrupted by the unmistakable sound of giggling from your right. You slowly turned your head to take in the boy two seats over, chuckling in flagrant amusement at your obvious predicament. Embarrassment seeped from the collar of your shirt. Not only was the very situation uncomfortable, but the fact that you recognised the boy beside you only helped to make matters worse.

You recognised the dark eyes, the gentle slope of his nose and his friendly, round cheeks to be that of the attractive boy from your philosophy elective. His warm brown hair was parted slightly to the side, the long fringe falling into his eyes as he found pleasure at your expense. If the boy you’d been admiring from a distance all semester revelling in your misery didn’t make the situation all the more worse, you didn’t know what did.

You took a deep breath, trying to rid your voice of its unsettled wobble, and leaned towards him slightly.

“Johnny, right?” You enquired in a whisper, gesturing with a pen in his direction. Upon noticing the way it visibly shook, you retracted it quickly. You were still trying to catch your breath from your useless bolt over there, and your suddenly thrashing heart was doing little to placate your pulse.

He chuckled slightly again, before nodding.

“What class is this?”

His voice came out in a smooth, deep timbre that you’d had the pleasure of listening to once or twice when you’d had a tutorial with him, but for the most part he tended to keep to himself. “It’s lit.”

You paused for a moment, blinking at him blankly. He stared back, an expectant quirk to the corner of his mouth.

“It’s lit?”

“Yeah?”

“Ok,” you mumbled, “I appreciate your enthusiasm for academia but… I actually would like to know what class this is. Like, which unit.”

He continued to stare at you for a second longer, before his shoulders began to shake violently in silent laughter, a large hand coming up to muffle the noise coming from his nose and mouth as he struggled to guffaw and breathe at the same time. “No,” he finally managed through heaving breaths, “like… this is Literature. International and Comparative Literature. Lit.”

You sank further into your seat, able to rest assured that your face could easily be used as a red traffic light in that moment. “Right.”

You averted your gaze, trying to focus on the garish clothes of the lecturer, but you were unable to shake the feeling of Johnny’s eyes still squinting in amusement at the side of your head.

His voice reach your ears in a whisper, “Dante Alighieri is pretty lit, though, fam.”

You held your face in your hands, trying to reconcile the suffocating embarrassment and the smile your were wearing in spite of your situation. “Oh my god…” you mumbled, before peeking up at him again to see a similar sort of grin spread across his own face, revealing his straight-toothed smile.

The rest of the lecture was spent with Johnny ignoring his class on Italian epic poetry, instead mocking you for your inability to leave the theatre.

“Just go,” he laughed in a hushed tone, “why are you sitting through this? I was kidding before. It’s actually boring as all get out.”

You found your normally quite quick-witted tongue unable to retort, having to suffice with just a shrug of the shoulders. Because not only was Johnny intimidatingly attractive, his lean body clothed in denim and draped casually over the seat, one arm slung over the back of the seat that separated the two of you as he leaned over and conversed in hushed tones. No, he was also the only person in your philosophy tutorial that understood metaphysics first go. Nobody understood metaphysics first go.

When the hour-long lecture finally dragged to an end and you clambered from your seat, untouched backpack in hand, Johnny fell into step beside you as you exited the hall.

“Well,” he mused, “at least you have an hour’s worth of knowledge about the intricacies of hell, according to Dante. I’d say that’s an hour well wasted.”

You cast him a sidelong glance that was meant to be withering, but he took little notice, instead bumping your shoulders amicably against each other. You didn’t have the guts to inform him that you hadn’t actually heard a word of anything the lecturer had been harping on about, your attention quite entirely consumed by the conflicting embarrassment and entertainment of listening to Johnny try to rapidly give you context about what the professor was saying, making a point to drop the terms ‘lit,’ ‘dank’ and ‘straight fire’ in as many times as feasibly possible. This inflamed your cheeks further, but also had you quelling laughter, so it was almost sort of an ok trade-off. You never would have guessed the quiet boy from your philosophy lecture would be so outgoing and charismatic, but you were glad that you knew now, nevertheless.

—

A week and a half passed at its regular, dragging pace, and you managed not to confuse any more of your timetable. You’d attended all of your economics lectures (you had to, if you actually wanted to pass) and got to your tuts on time. Your efficiency was such a change that it managed to simultaneously impress and disappoint your group of friends. Your systematisation alleviated them of their responsibility to shepherd you from hither to thither, but it also denied them the opportunity to tease you mercilessly. You were thankful for this, really. The ridicule had only just petered off after your run in with International and Comparative Literature almost two weeks prior.

Speaking of, you had gathered the bravery to sit next to Johnny in your philosophy tutorials over the past couple of weeks, finding the conversation to flow even smoother when you weren’t crippled by situational embarrassment. You overcame the intimidation you felt from him, getting along with him so easily that the professor was quickly losing his patience with the pair of you and your incessant chatter. Johnny was distracting you, that was for sure, but you couldn’t find the will to move away from him. His cologne was fresh and nice, like mint and lemongrass, and he always lent you his stupidly expensive but incredibly smooth pens to annotate textbooks with, and you were pretty sure that if you moved back to your original seat on the opposite side of the room you would spend the entire time wondering if he was wearing the cologne or bemoaning the fact that the ink in your pen kept skipping.

Two weeks after the incident you were sat beside your friend on the grass, passing time until your afternoon lecture. The weather was still oppressively hot, and your friend’s cologne was filling your nostrils from where he was reclined beside you.

“Doyoung,” you grumbled, “you always spray too much of that. It’s like you douse yourself in Lynx like a prepubescent boy.”

“Oi,” he flailed a hand absently in your direction, trying to make reprimanding contact with your body, “would you prefer me to smell like sweat? I can make that happen for you.”

You reached over to tug at one of his cheeks. “You’re so perfect and smart that I’m sure your natural scent is daisies and sunshine.”

“Get off me.”

“Affection won’t kill you, Doyoung.”

“No, but you certainly might one day.”

Your attention was grabbed by a passing figure, their tall frame unmistakable for your keen eye. Johnny sauntered past, long legs striding easily towards where a group of his friends were gathered on the grass a few metres from where you and Doyoung were melting in the sun. He carried his backpack over one shoulder with relaxed ease, his white t-shirt falling appealingly over the planes of his lithe torso. He was one of those people that wore clothes well, you noted for yourself. He wore a pale blue cap over his brunette head, effectively keeping his fringe and the sun from his eyes. His head flew back in laughter, his eyes crinkling at the edges and his mouth opening to once again expose a toothy grin.

“Stop checking him out,” Doyoung scolded you half-heartedly from where he lay, one arm covering his eyes. How did he know?

“I’m not.” You were.

Johnny turned in your direction and lifted a hand in an exuberant wave. Oh shit. He’d caught you openly examining him from head to toe, and now you wanted the grass beneath you to open up and pull you down to the pits of hell. At least there you wouldn’t be able to embarrass yourself any further. Maybe there was a special circle of hell for those who were critically socially inept? You hoped so. You could all commiserate together.

You lifted a hand tentatively to return the wave, shooting him an abashed smile, when somebody else breezed past you. You recognised the boy to be Ten, one of Johnny’s closest friends, and judging by the way his hand was also raised towards Johnny, the person who was meant to receive the greeting.

You let out an audible ‘fuck’ before turning quickly to the dozing Doyoung, trying desperately to rope him into some sort of conversation to mask your social faux pas.

“Look like you’re talking to me about something super important,” you demanded, prodding his side incessantly. He peered from beneath his elbow, frowning dismissively at you.

“No, I’m napping.”

“Doyoung, do this for me.”

“For you? Definitely no, then.”

As you continued to pointedly avoid looking in Johnny’s direction, you tried to weigh the pros and cons. Con: you’d made yourself look like an idiot. Pro: he hadn’t seen you checking him out, right?

You hear another raucous round of laughter from his group of friends and squeezed your eyes shut further.

“Fine,” you muttered to your useless friend, “I’m going to the library then.”

You stood, dusting stray blades of grass from your bare legs and hauling the straps of your backpack onto your shoulders, prepared to get out of there as soon as possible and allow the air-conditioning of the library to cool you down. You turned on your heel, but a voice calling your name impeded your progress. Upon recognising the familiar, low tones, you rapidly contemplated whether you could get away with pretending you hadn’t heard him, or if you really were socially obligated to turn around and face the awkward.

Apparently it was the latter. You turned a smile towards him. “Hey Johnny. How are you?”

“I’m good,” he began simply enough, “but you’d know that, right? I saw you looking.”

“What?” You blurted.

Doyoung scoffed from where he lay, still blocking the sun from his eyes. “You weren’t subtle.”

“And you weren’t helpful.”

“Helpfulness wasn’t required from me.”

“No, but it would have been appreciated.”

Johnny chuckled at your exchange, before gesturing a mocking hand at his own body, “It’s all right, I’m looking particularly impeccable, today.”

You took in what he was wearing—shorts with an odd stain near the thigh and a t-shirt he may very well have slept in—but his actual appearance was lost on you. With your proximity in that moment, you could smell the refreshing wafts of cologne and had to be ability to be the source of that dazzling smile. Although he’d been kidding, you really weren’t.

You weren’t sure how to respond to him, so you decided to proceed with your exit. “I was just going, so I—”

“Actually,” Johnny interrupted you, reaching out as if to grab your arm, but retracting his hand before he could make contact. Did you read something almost nervous in his expression? “I was wondering if you were free to help me with this metaphysics thesis assignment? I don’t really get it.”

You were, once again, more than a little lost for words as you met his nervous gaze with a blank one of your own. “But… you understood metaphysics in class?”

A blush—dear god a blush— blossomed on the apples of his round cheeks, his eyes averting to somewhere above your head. “Uh, I meant epistemology. I really don’t get epistemology.”

Excitement flushed through you as you understood what he was doing, what his motives were. You decided to play along, to alleviate him of the pressure of the embarrassment that was evidently growing within him.

“Oh, yeah, for sure. As I said before, I was just heading to the library now, if you want to come?”

His rose-hued cheeks persisted as he opened his mouth again. “Or maybe we could sit down in the cafe that sells smoothies and juices around the corner? I really could go for something.”

You tried to control your smile, maintaining it at a level that was calm and appropriate and didn’t allude to the chaotic rush of excitement that you were experiencing.

“Yeah, that sounds perfect.”

And so commenced a session of very little study (he absolutely understood epistemology, the liar) and copious amounts of easy conversation. The pair of you found yourselves chatting for hours, your rendezvous cut short by the necessity of education. As the pair of you stood to leave—you to an economics lecture and him to the library to actually get work done—he grabbed your unlocked phone from your hand and inserted his number.

“You have my number but I don’t have yours. That means you have to text me first,” he informed you with a wry smile. You glanced between the new contact and his face, before quirking an eyebrow.

“Was this really a date, just now?” You asked with confidence you didn’t know you possessed when in his presence.

“No.”

You tried not to let your expression visibly fall.

“I want our actual first date to be more organised. I’ll ask you properly, and take you somewhere nice, and I can pay or we can split the bill, depending on what you prefer, and we could see a movie or do something different, or—”

“Already sounds perfect,” you cut off his rambling before it could pick up too much momentum of its own. “I have to get to this lecture.”

He chuckled and ruffled your hair slightly, “You always have to rush off somewhere.”

“Because I’m perpetually late.”

“I know,” he conceded, “just don’t forget to text me, ok?”

“I won’t.”

“You sure?”

“Should I give you something to put you at ease?”

He tilted his head to the side, scrunching up his eyebrows in confusion. “What? Like insurance? A bond of five dollars and a free juice?”

You ignored his suggestions, instead placing your hands on his arms for leverage and reaching up to press your lips to the soft skin of his cheek. It was a quick and chaste gesture, but seemingly plenty good enough for him.

When you rocked back onto the flats of your feet and tilted your head up to Johnny, you were pleased to see him bashfully trying to disguise a flustered expression.

“Was that enough to soothe your worries?”

He recovered alarmingly quickly, “Oh, I don’t know. I think I’ll need another few of those to really know for sure that you’ll text me.”

Had it been any other boy shamelessly flirting back, you may have rolled your eyes or jabbed a fist into his shoulder, but you found yourself without the desire to retaliate in such a way. Probably because you were more than happy to comply.


End file.
